[QUOTE=chr1s;200516]Just read through Zhou’s stuff:
Shadows weren’t all that in my opinion, was hell of a lot of flickering on weapons and players for example that was rather distracting.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, shadows are hard tech, I’ll admit. I would say where we’re at right now is comparable to 95% of the games out there, and we are working on making them betta 
The cutscenes were an interesting experiment. One month before the E3 demo, we had NOTHING at all, and in that time, we had to get storyboards made, actors hired, a mocap studio booked, a session done, all the animation and audio cleaned up, and all the data in game, which was impressive because we had no code to support ingame cutscenes at the start. So they’re a minor miracle that with almost zero prep work, we got it all done at all I know, it sounds like an excuse, but we’re pretty happy with the end results, considering.
However, I’ll definitely go on record right now as saying that Brink isn’t all about award winning narrative that will change the state of game cutscenes forever. We have a narrative thread throughout the game, there are characters who represent the two factions, the socio/political problems of the Ark will be explored, but we’re not going to be the second coming of storytelling in a shooter. We’re much more worried about our gameplay being fun than our cutscenes competing with Final Fantasy or something like that.
But they will be nice and interesting, I think. But don’t expect them to make you cry or something…
Hehe, fair point, and very observant, I might add. But not to worry. The reason it looked like that is because when we were setting this demo up for E3, we knew we had to give a dozen presentations a day, so we wanted to get as much action into a very short time window as possible. So the demo of action in CCity that you watched had the spawn wave timer set to zero, and the spawn locations artificially moved much closer to the front line, so we could show off more action in the limited time we had. Normally, CCity plays out twice as long as what you saw, because of course a big part of the tactics of ET are about routing the enemy and taking advantage of the downtime while they respawn. But to have all that ebb and flow in the demo means we would have been able to show even less of the level.
So that, combined with Pauls uber grenade launcher (mentioned in a previous reply) combines to make it look like there’s a problem that really doesn’t exist. Don’t worry, spawn areas are very well fortified, and we’re working hard to make sure that spawn camping is not a problem in the shipping game.
this thread is becoming a ‘making of the demo’ feature!
Yeah, there’s a bunch of little glitches like that in the demo. As you can imagine, over the last 6 months, things have been cleaned up quite a bit. But that’s the danger of showing so early…
Sorry to hear that. Hopefully this helped put some of what you saw into context (not making excuses, just explanations). Of course, the game is looking better all the time internally… 
